Huey PRO Colorimeter

Select ThinkPads feature a Pantone Huey PRO Colorimeter by X-Rite in the palm rest. This is used for calibrating the colours of the LCD display. The way calibration works is that you close the LID and the display remains on with a special test screen, and the sensor in the palm rest does its thing.

If you do not have a colour meter, Lenovo provides pre-calibrated profiles for most ThinkPads. Please see Colour profile.

Linux support

This sensor works with argyllcms and dispcalGUI under openSUSE 11.3. However, the sensor is not recognized properly under Ubuntu 10.04 or Debian (Lenny and Etch).
Gnome Color Manager allows for automatic loading of a color profile created by dispcalGUI at startup, but calibration an profiling remains impossible.
What is more, when calibrating / profiling the lid cannot be closed entirely, because the screen goes blank (at least I did not find a way to avoid this). Hence the lid must be supported with a book on the edge of the frame and I also covered the entire machine with a towel to minimize distortion of color hue by the influence of ambient light (be careful not to cover the heat exhausts).